AM I THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO WOULD RECOGNIZE THIS GUY FROM HIS HAIR ALONE? YES I AM!!! AND HE WAS A MUSICAL GOD TO ME!

THIS GUY...KILLED RAP FOR ME!

By Steve Sharpton, Parsons Training, Tucson, Arizona

PHASE VIApril 23, 2015

By the time you read this post today, I will most likely be grooving to some good ol’Merle Haggard. Now I absolutely hate modern country music, for it is written terribly and all the singers sound pretty much the same. Seriously, can you really tell any of them apart. And the fact the industry is ruled by Taylor Swift and Florida Georgia Line is also pretty disheartening. Either way, I love to listen to the old country stars, especially Willie Nelson, Kenny Rogers, George Jones, Glenn Campbell, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, The Statler Brothers, Patsy Cline and especially Conway Twitty. I mean, he had it all, the hair, the bad rhinestone infused clothes and the look of a man that looked like he could drink anyone under the table. When I grew up, my parents didn’t listen to pop music all the much, so while many were growing up with Madonna and Guns N Roses, I was listening to Alabama, The Oak Ridge Boys and even George Strait (I am old enough to have heard “All My Exes Live in Texas”when it first came out!) Anyway, I naturally veered away when I first started hearing the “music”of Garth Brooks, and that was pretty much the end of country music for me as I veered into gangster rap and dirty, profanity laced grunge. And then when Tupac Shakur went to Death Row Records-losing his social conscience in the process-and Biggy Smalls suddenly...

became popular, rap was over for me and all that was left was rock. Anyway, to see one of the old timers will be a real treat, merely to the effect Merle is pushing 80 and thanks to marijuana (he and Willie Nelson are very good friends, hehe) and apparently good doctors, he is still moving around pretty well. I’m getting pretty giddy about the show, as you can probably gauge, for I’m hoping he rips out some goodies like Silver Wings, Workin’Man Blues and Okie from Muskogee (which I hope he follows with “It’s all Going to Pot”of “The Bottle Let Me Down,”which the song Okie is all about clean living, hehe). Either way, this begins a very long weekend for me, one where I will have little time to myself over the course of a few days. This means there will be no Sunday blog, so hopefully Jon recycles a good blog post that is worth reposting. But this also leads me to unload some more things I have been seeing quite often.

THE NEVER-ENDING BODY DEBATE…..I’ll admit, I am tired of talking about this, every day, I am bombarded with people trying to create some wave with some campaign. I’ve already talked about Fat Shaming and Skinny Hating…a lot. I have gotten into flame wars with people online telling them that being extremely obese isn’t about how you feel about yourself, it’s about the bad health you are setting yourself up for down the line. Doesn’t anyone think of the long term anymore? Would you really want to sacrifice your twilight years with a lot of bad health and pills when you could have just used that positive ego of yours to say “Yeah, I love myself, but I love myself enough to understand that this morbidly obese body is going to ruin my life down the line.”I’ll admit, the truth is really hard to stomach, for it took years for me to really start taking control of my problems. Who would have thought my problem these days is eating too much food and not working out enough, as opposed to thinking I wasn't eating enough food to fill a 400-pound man and rarely doing anything more than taking a walk around the block. Anyway, this leads to an interesting meme that I saw on Facebook the other day.

With summer just around the corner, I have been seeing bunches of posts from people complaining about being soft and not having a “bikini/summer”body for the rest of the masses to enjoy. Now, I can attest to this issue, merely because my farmer’s tan needs a lot of work before I really feel comfortable taking my shirt off or even wearing a bare bones tank top. The meme in question is quite profane, but very true. “How to get a Bikini Body. 1.) Put a bikini on your body. 2) Stop giving a shit about what everyone else thinks.”Now the weird thing, it’s not like I have been seeing these online complaints from just out of shape people, but I’ve been seeing it from people that are really in shape! Like the only real difference is they only have a two-pack as opposed to a six-pack. So this brings up the question. How can anyone have an opinion about body politics when they have a skewed vision of their own? Yes, I know I fall under this category, but I’m at least honest about myself. I look a million times better than what I used to, but I am still not where I want to be. The pockets of fat around my stomach will aid me in my argument. Either way, this just seems strange to me, that so many people are looking to take some extreme measures and judge their own bodies for a silly “season”that is not clearly defined or even fully recognized (try saying it is “bikini season”in Northern Canada or the middle of the Sahara Desert where you can get a debilitating sunburn within minutes).

Personally, I would prefer to look at “summer”season as “life.”Anyway, this complicated argument will always have new chapters to add, for just yesterday a Youtube workout star pulled an interesting experiment on the world. Now, I’m not going to lie, but Cassy Ho is gorgeous as is in my book, so to hear internet trolls attack her body is pretty weird. But she put together a pretty interesting video along with a tweet where she literally altered her body based on the suggestions of some of the knuckleheads that anonymously troll the internet. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/22/cassey-ho-photoshops-her-body_n_7116766.html Either way, the whole debate is just starting to burn me out, for the true message we should continue to preach is not about body image, but about personal health. But much like everything in life, the hands of fate have turned people against each other to the point where the true point of the debate will never be settled.

FIRST MILK, NOW YOGURT. I was never a big yogurt eater, but I did like a good cherry yogurt from time to time. The good stuff used to be from Dannon, where they would have the cherries on the bottom and you would have mix the concoction up. Anyway, yogurt has gotten quite a boost over the last decade, whether it be Jamie Lee Curtis hawking pro-biotic yogurt or the meteoric rise of authentic greek yogurt brands. Truthfully, with the exception of cheese, just about every dairy product fell out of favor with me. I rarely ate creme cheese. I never ate cottage cheese. And like I have mentioned in previous blogs, I probably haven’t swigged milk sine the 90s in cases other than making macaroni and cheese (unless you call Muscle Milk “milk”). Milk has already taken quite a beating this year, for it was illustrated in multiple studies that the supposed bone building goodness of the product was rather false. Of course, the entire industry didn’t even skip a bit, for now they say it’s just a good source of protein (I certainly hope it is is, it is designed to turn a 30-pound animal into the size of a small British car….think about that when you see the scale going in the wrong direction). Anyway, a new study conducted in Spain by the Autonomous University of Madrid published a recent study that indicated yogurt may be the next dairy product that will need a new PR campaign. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/292809.php

Now we have heard just about everything in regards to howe yogurt is healthy for you. It’s a good source of calcium. It’s good for stomach bugs that live in our bodies. Some even stated it might aid in the reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. According to the study however, these claims might seem to have a very shaky foothold. Amongst the 4,445 participants in the study, the researchers discovered the people who regularly ate yogurt showed no real signs of health superiority over the other group of people who didn’t eat any yogurt. This reminds me of an interesting episode of Seinfeld where the gang starts eating “low fat”frozen yogurt, only to find out the yogurt was being laced with extra sugar and fat. Ironically, this episode led to some people actually inquiring about the rising fad at the time, only to find out art imitated life quite closely. Now with this new information in regards to yogurt, should we start getting on the bandwagon and set up a lawsuit similar to the one that's laid down on Naked Juice when it was found out the juice was not all natural and full of added sugar and other chemical additives? Now of course, the major flaw in the study is the fact the researchers were not terribly vigilant in what other foods the participants ate, but on the other hand, the lofty claims of the yogurt lobby indicated they may be nothing more than creamy Little Debbies or a refrigerated version of Swiss Miss. Either way, you won’t be seeing me eat that stuff any time soon.

STICK WITH THE TRUTH, NOT THE “TRUTH.”I got into yet another interesting argument online the other day (seriously, I’m reverting here) about the nature of some fad diets, and how some people follow it with a cultish mentality. Typically I have to fight off the Paleo freaks who suddenly notice I’m a vegan (because as the old joke goes, “How do you know someone is vegan? They tell you!”) and constantly argue that our pro-magnon ancestors would have never eaten fruits and veggies, while I always have to state that agriculture pretty much changed the world and for the most part, people rarely ate meat and dairy due to the expense and the abundance of vegetables. But now I am getting into battles with people that are really into Raw food eating, partaking in diets like Raw Till 4 and 80-10-10 and proclaiming how awesome and lean they are and denouncing carbohydrates like it is the plague. Now I don’t mind fruit, but due to teeth problems, it is becoming rather tricky for me. Plus I don’t really believe in “Fruitarianism,”where diets like the 30-bananas a day diet, which has been touted by the rather self serving Freeleh the Banana Girl and her goofball boyfriend Durian Rider. I have a hard time believing these people, merely because their claims are just too incredulous to believe. We have the story about the recently disgraced blogger that claimed she cured her cancer with diet, admitting she never had cancer to begin with! http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/wellness-gurus-belle-gibson-pseudoscience And of course, the interesting thing this article points out is the fact that many of these so-called food experts have no real experience or education in anything food and health related. And they always have the perfect pitch, “Such and such industry has bought off my detractors, so follow me! Don’t forget to buy my book, the merchandise on my website and the phone app and maybe you will look a pretty as me!”Yup, conflict of interest indeed.

While there is no question that these diets can offer some good results over the short term, it seems kind of crazy to take on a non-tested diet that really hasn’t had any long term research. While I don’t eat meat anymore, the Mediterranean Diet does have some muscle to back-up its claims, but this diet mostly focuses on good eating health. Pretty soon, more asian based diets will most likely become quite a norm in our culture due to the perceived health benefits and the fact it wouldn’t discourage any type of food over another. http://www.nationmultimedia.com/life/Eating-for-peak-health-fitness-and-longevity-30258377.html Researchers are always looking for the right combination for food to present a good image of health. If anything, they are starting to use the examples of asian cultures, primarily from Okinawa, Japan, as a good picture of health. In Okinawa, the island is well known for it’s longevity, boasting more centenarians per capita than any other country. How do they do this? Well, they primarily eat a diet high in green and yellow plants and legumes, with low amounts of rice, meat and fish. Not to mention they have a very low sugar diet, which is certainly a contentious subject here in the United States. http://www.nationmultimedia.com/life/Eating-for-peak-health-fitness-and-longevity-30258377.html Now while we have all these “health experts”trying to seek fame a fortune, I think I would rather go with what is proven, not with what is implied or exploited to make a few bucks. But alas, that is the culture we live in, for he who speaks the loudest and spouts off the most truthful sounding “truth”makes the money, regardless of the damage that is caused or the reality of the claims. So that is why I prefer something like the Okinawa Centenarian Study, where some real truth is presented not in the ideas, but in the looks of the rather youthful looking 100-year olds that walk around on that island (and I do mean walk! And even bike ride!).

About Parsons TrainingParsons Training is a Tucson leader in fitness and personal wellness training. Every personal trainer with this company designs and implements effective fitness programs for their clients; these programs serve as the foundation for good health, fitness, and wellness. Additional information about Parsons Training is available at http://www.parsonspersonaltraining.com

Any views or opinions presented in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the company.

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Meet the Author

Steve, a Parsons Training Client, went from 400 pounds to Running half-marathons, from lifting pizzas to lifting hundreds of pounds through training with us.When you read this blog you are reading through the eyes of someone who is winning the battle of real weight loss. Steve is not a fitness professional, but he is someone we can all learn from.Steve shares his journey once a week here on our blog. We hope that you find a spark of inspiration from reading his blog.

​Any views or opinions presented in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the company. The author of this blog is an independent writer and is not an associate of Parsons Training, LLC. Any information or images displayed are done so solely at the authors discretion. Any dietary or fitness commentary is exclusively that of the author and in no way dictated by the company.